1/20/10: A new paper by a slew of butterfly biologists and Nate on the effects of climate change and habitat alteration just came out in PNAS. You can read it here.

1/19/10: The newest news of the new year is that JP Lessard has accepted a postdoc at The Center for Macroecology, Evolution, and Climate at the University of Copenhagen.

12/28/09: Mariano is in Patagonia initiating his field work in the southern hemisphere.

12/21/09: Nate is off to Denmark for a while to work with Carsten Rahbek's group at the University of Copenhagen.

12/2/09: For those of you wanting to do some reading over the break, here's a great book (with a chapter by Rob, Nate, Mike, and Benoit).

11/24/09: Here are a few recent pictures from the Ant Warming Experiment at Duke Forest (AWE@DF).

11/19/09: If you've ever wanted to know how much understory plant and tree communities in the Smokies have changed over the past 30 years, you should read this new paper by Windy Bunn, former undergrad Claire Brown, Mike Jenkins, and Nate in Ecography.

11/16/09: Mariano's got a new webpage.

11/6/09: Nate is off for a week at NCEAS to think about beta diversity. Jon Chase has agreed to buy all of Nate's dinners for the entire week.

10/27/09: Doug Levey of hot pepper and corridor fame is visitng the lab later week. We're all looking forward to it, even though he's a Gator.

10/26/09: Nate is off to Centre College to talk ants with undergrads.

10/20/09: Nate is off to Duke to give a seminar to the Ecology group and visit Duke Forest.

10/14/09: Nate is geauxing to LSU to give a seminar in the Entomology Department.

10/8/09: Gary Graves from the Smithsonian Institution is visiting the lab this week.

9/29/09: Two new papers in Ecology this month. The first by JP, Jim Fordyce, Nick Gotelli and Nate shows that invasive ants can alter the phylogenetic structure of ant communities. The second is by Travis Belote (former UTK grad student), Nate, and Bob Jones and shows how disturbance alters local-regional relationships in forests.

9/18/09: Nate is in China visiting JY Fang's group at Peking University. It's an amazing place, with lots of people working on lots of interesting projects. But Nate has yet to win a table tennis match.

8/29/09: New paper by Crutsinger, Sanders, and Classen on intra- vs. inter-specific variation in decomposition rate in Solidago species.

8/24/09: Two, count them, two new papers from the lab group. The first one is in Ecology Letters, with Nick Haddad as the lead author and Greg as a co-author. The second one is a by Mariano in Diversity and Distributions.

8/23/09: Nate is teaching a grad seminar in Community Ecology this semester. Click here to see what they're up to.

7/29/09: Here's a cool picture of a (probably) Formica obscuripes nest at a field site in Colorado.

6/13/09: Nate is at RMBL for the rest of the summer working on ants in the mountains (lots of Formica...).

5/26/09: Nate is at NESCent worrying about montane biodiversity.

5/22/09: Ever wonder if Argentine ants affect seed-dispersal mutualisms? Then you should read the new paper by Mariano, Katie, Martin Nunez, and Nate in Biology Letters.

5/21/09: It's the beginning of the field season and traveling season. Nate is at Duke Forest with Rob Dunn, Katie, and Aaron Ellison to discuss their warming experiment, then off to NESCent to talk about diversity in mountains.

5/15/09: Surely you've wondered about the coefficients in spatial and non-spatial regression? So did the 46 authors of this new manuscript in Ecography.

4/21/09: End of the semester here; Nate is off to UC San Diego to visit David Holway, Walter Jetz, et al. and go anting in the desert.

4/03/09: JP was just awarded an NSF DDIG!

4/01/09: Jon Chase, Amy Freestone, and Nate will be leading a working group on beta diversity this fall at NCEAS. Stay tuned for reports on interesting papers arising from the group...

3/28/09: Greg Crutsinger is now Dr. Gregory M. Crutsinger.

3/25/09: Big news! Katie Stuble was just awarded a DOE GREF fellowship!

3/24/09: Greg Crutsinger's Dissertation Defense and Exit Seminar are this Friday. Not bad for a kid from small town in Ohio.

3/11/09: Nate is off to Copenhagen to work with Carsten Rahbek and his group for the next 10 days.

3/10/09: Diversity in local ant communities is assymetrical around the equator, at least according to a new paper by Rob Dunn, JP Lessard, Nate, and 26 of their closest friends in Ecology Letters.

3/03/09: Nate is just back from giving a seminar in Middle Tennessee State and is getting ready for prospective grad student weekend at UTK.

2/20/09: How many ecological buzzwords can you fit into one paper? Crutsinger, Cadotte, and Sanders have set the bar pretty high in a new paper in Ecology Letters on inquiline community structure in rosette galls.

2/19/09: Chris Buddle from McGill is visiting the lab this week and giving the departmental seminar.

2/10/09: Jane Zelikova just landed a sweet postdoc in Moab, UT working on soil ecology!

2/9/09: JP's paper with Rob and Nate on the structure of ant communities in temperate forests just got accepted at Insectes Sociaux. If you knew what JP had to go through to do this work, you'd be *really* impressed.

1/7/09: Today's the first day of spring semester, the new and improved grad course in Ecology, and the day before JP and Nate leave to go to the IBS meeting in Merida, Mexico.

12/13/08: Great party to celebrate Lara's PhD!

12/10/08: Big news: Greg just found out that he was awarded the Miller Fellowship at UC-Berkeley.

12/06/08: Nate just returned from WashU, where he hung out with the incredible faculty and students.

11/19/08: JP was just awarded a travel grant to attend the International Biogeography Society meeting in Merida, Mexico next January.

11/14/08: Nate is off to Reno to participate in the Entomological Collections Network Annual meeting.

11/10/08: Sure, host-plant genotypes matter. But do they influence foliage-based and litter-based communities in the same way?This paper by Crutsinger et al. has the answer, at least for Solidago.

10/22/08: Greg is giving a talk in Entomology at UC Davis, JP is beginning to write his DDIG, Jarrod is beginning to write his GREF, Katie is becoming a modeler, Mariano is a meta-analyzer, and Nate stays home with sick kids.

9/29/08: Nate is teaching Community Ecology (EEB 421) in the spring. Sign up now, before it's too late!

9/08/08: The big Sanders-Classen Lab Fall party went off without a hitch. Click here for a picture of the whole gang and their friends.

8/13/08: Ever wonder what all of those Aphaenogater rudis ants are doing in temperate forests? Then check out this new paper by Jane Zelikova, Rob Dunn, and Nate.

8/11/08: Want to see where everyone in the lab has been this summer? Then click here.

7/30/08: Field season is starting to wind down, and everyone is gearing up for a trip to ESA in Milwaukee.

7/5/08: Nate is off to the International Entomological Congress in Durban, South Africa and then to an Argentine Ant Workshop in Stellenbosch.

6/26/08: This should've been posted a while back. But if you wanted to know how to be a good grad student in ecology, read the reply by Simberloff and Nate published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Oh, and Greg and Martin Nuñez had some thoughts too.

6/23/08: Lara Souza is now Dr. Lara Souza!

6/12/08: Knoxville is Austin without the hype...

6/09/08: Before your next trip to Sweden, make sure you read this paper by Crutsinger, Sanders, Albrectsen, Abreu and Wardle in Functional Ecology on how ecosystem retrogression affects trophic interactions.

5/31/08: Nate is just back from a NESCent working group on montane biodiversity. Tomorrow he takes off for some field work in Arizona.

5/15/08: The lab has emptied out for the summer. Tara is at Coweeta & Harvard Forest, Mariano is in Argentina, Windy is on her way to the Grand Canyon, JP is in Japan & Spain, Greg is in California, and Maggie and Lara are holed up finishing their theses.

5/8/08: Congratulations to Windy Bunn, who just defended her Masters Thesis!

4/30/08: Phil Lester from Victoria University of Wellington is visiting the lab, giving a seminar, and checking out some of our sites (and ants) in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

4/25/08: Nate is in Boulder for Jane Zelikova's PhD seminar and to collaborate with Christy McCain on a couple of projects.

4/21/08: Greg is off to Bodega Bay to initiate a couple of new projects with Jay Stachowicz and Sharon Strauss.

4/14/08: Jon Chase is visiting the lab this week and giving a departmental seminar.

3/29/08: Ever wonder about the effects of climatic change on Banksia in Western Australia? If so, check out this new paper by Fitzpatrick et al. in Global Change Biology.

3/26/08: BIG NEWS: JP Lessard was just awarded an NSERC fellowship, and Greg Crutsinger just received an NSF DDIG!

3/25/08: Brian Inouye and Nora Underwood from Florida State are visiting the lab this Thursday and Friday.

2/25/08: It's official: Matt Fitzpatrick is now Dr. Matthew C. Fitzpatrick, PhD. Sooner than any of us want, he's off to Harvard Forest to begin a postdoc.

2/4/08: Greg is in the south of France giving a talk on community genetics. He's also drinking lots of wine and eating lots of bread and cheese.

1/31/08: Matt Fitzpatrick is gearing up to defend his PhD and start a postdoc based at Harvard Forest.

1/14/08: Happy new year! We've been slow to post, because of the addition of the newest lab member over the Holidays: Finn Marshall Sanders was born on December 17.

12/11/07: It's the end of the fall semester, and a new paper by Crutsinger, superstar undergrad alum Mellisa Habenicht, Classen, Schweitzer and Sanders was just published in Plant and Soil.

12/3/07: A new paper by Nicole Heller, Jessica Shors, Deborah Gordon, and Nate on the invasion dynamics of the Argentine ant just came out in Oecologia.

11/22/07: Just in time for Thanksgiving, a new paper in Oikos by Crutsinger, Collins, Fordyce, and Sanders on the temporal dynamics of the arthropod community associated with Solidago.

11/16/07: Greg is up at Eastern Kentucky University giving a seminar.

11/13/07: Lara, Windy, Greg led John Wiens from the Nature Conservancy around the field sites at Freel's Bend.

11/6/07: Nick Haddad from NC State is visiting the lab and giving a departmental seminar.

11/2/07: Rob Dunn and collaborators are here to begin setting up the warming experiment at Duke Forest and Harvard Forest.

10/31/07: Just in time for Halloween, check out the new paper on genotypes and genotypic diversity as barriers to plant invasions by Crutsinger, Souza, and Sanders in Ecology Letters.

10/2/07: Tara is off to Coweeta to sample top predators in leaf litter communities, then to Harvard Forest to begin a litter transplant experiment.

9/26/07: Greg is at the University of Zurich giving a talk, and Nate is at GBIF in Copenhagen at a workshop on diversity in montane regions.

9/18/07: JP and his devoted field crew have just finished harvesting a 3-month long experiment looking at the interactive effects of temperature and food addition on leaf-litter ant (and arthropod) community structure along the environmental gradient in the Smokies. Now the ID'ing begins...

9/17/07: Nate is just back from beautiful Boulder, where he visited Jane Zelikova and her committee. Matt's just back from a trip to Australia where he worked on several collaborative projects.

9/15/07: Check out this new paper in Ecology by Sanders, Weltzin, Crutsinger, Nuñez, Fitzpatrick, Oswalt, and Lane. The paper shows, using a manipulative experiment, how multiple factors can interact to shape invasions.

8/26/07: After 29 nights in the tents, 250 miles of hiking, 4 bee stings, and about 200 Clif bars...Windy Bunn (with the help of undergrad superstar Claire Brown) has finished her field work in the Smokies!

8/05/07: Kerri Crawford's paper with Greg and Nate appears in this month's issue of Ecology. Click here to check it out. And there's a nice paper in the same issue testing whether the metabolic theory of ecology can account for broad-scale variation in species richness. There are several responses to the paper that are also worth reading.

8/04/07: Windy and Lara are off to present at ESA in beautiful San Jose.

6/20/07: More big news from Canada (Quebec really): JP Lessard was just awarded a prestigious 3-yr FQRNT fellowship to support his PhD research.
And Tara Sackett will be joining the lab as a postdoc for two years, also supported a FQRNT fellowship.
Thanks, Canada!

5/27/07: Greg is visiting David Wardle's group in Sweden until October.

5/26/07: Here's a new paper by Dunn, Parker and Sanders on temporal partitioning in ant communities.

5/17/07: Check out the new paper on assembly rules in ant commmunities by Sanders, Gotelli, Wittman, Ratchford, Ellison, and Jules in the Journal of Biogeography.

5/9/07: Nate is in Copenhagen for an Ecography meeting and to meet with Carsten Rahbek's group at the University of Copenhagen.